Aug 25, 2021

Coffee producers are using machine learning to grow better beans.What’s new: Beverage giant Nespresso is rolling out a system to assess the quality of hybrid coffee seedlings using technology from Israeli-Colombian startup Demetria.

A new study examines a major strain of recent research: huge models pretrained on immense quantities of uncurated, unlabeled data and then fine-tuned on a smaller, curated corpus.

Recently I attended an online celebration of my late grandfather’s life. He had passed away quietly in his sleep in March. Two days later, Coursera was publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange. And two days after that, my son Neo Atlas Ng was born.

An epidemic of opioid abuse in the U.S. killed 93,000 people in 2020 alone. An algorithm intended to help doctors prescribe the drugs responsibly may be barring worthy patients from pain relief.

Pretraining methods generate basic representations for later fine-tuning, but they’re prone to certain issues that can throw them off-kilter. New work proposes a solution.